skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really? Because I've said no to folks five layers of management over my head, when I knew their comments to be technically inappropriate. I said it diplomatically, to be sure, but firmly and without hesitation.

I think the question is set up properly for the trap to be fair. Having been given clear responsibility for presenting a topic, a time limit, and the floor, I wouldn't think twice about directing the discussion.

Though I also don't perceive the balance of power in an interview to be that asymmetric, either. Usually they're courting me as much as I'm courting them. If anything, it offers a nice opportunity for a reverse test: management that has a problem with technically appropriate direction is not management I want to work for.
I think they created a specific benchmark for their use case. Maybe they even implemented part of their requirements on both stacks.
It appears our blog is down. Oof. Apologies for the inconvenience. While we're figuring it out on it here is a mirror of the post: http://blog.untrod.com/2012/10/engineering-practices-in-data...

Edit: And we're back up.
Don't Metro IE and Metro Office still use Win32?
Random International installs torrential rain in Barbican gallery
TSA unveils new, less revealing body scanners at Logan
Happy to see folks here are as excited as we are! Our founding team has put in many years of research on the kinds of problems we're now tackling commercially, including the stuff @pgbovine mentioned and more. Building beautifully useful data software is a major technical and design challenge. It's not just designing interfaces. It's not just building systems. It's not just modeling and inference. It's all three, and especially the way they interplay. Hence the name Trifacta.

If that sounds exciting to you, and you are interested in a well-funded, rational, early-stage data startup ... we're hiring. Based in SF, across the street from CalTrain. Drop us a line. jobs@trifacta.com
You can assess almost nothing that would distinguish one qualified candidate from another to determine who is better spending five minutes with a person. The fact that you see the faults you predicted when you were overruled on hiring decisions is a confirmation bias, not a scientific study of any kind.

Job interviews are a terrible method of hiring good long term people, just a necessary evil to weed out the moronic or insane. The concentration has to be long term on how the person does on the job, the willingness to work hard to retain good people and get rid of ones who aren't working out.

People who are involuntarily committed are observed for more than an hour, because it's known that an insane person can hold it together and appear normal for longer than that period of time before they start talking to people who aren't there.

I couldn't be more sick of posts with "that one interview question" and people who think they are clairvoyant "five minute judges" of character.
The problem is, one can't own a domain, but only lease it for a time being. And one can't migrate between johnny@example.edu and john@example.org.

That's how inflexible this protocol is, compared with a simple keypair.
There are strict limitations on iOS that prevent third-party browsers from getting good performance. For example, third-party applications distributed through the app store cannot do any runtime code generation. This prevents third-party browsers from having great Javascript performance.

Enterprise apps do not have this limitation, but that does not help regular consumers.
unbreakable? "military-grade RSA encryption"? The keys have 6.2 bits of entropy!
There are a number of Reprap variants that print better than the Replicator 2 for less than half the price.
Because they suck.

Specifically their range - you must appease consumer's range anxiety otherwise you have a golf cart on your hands. Tesla does this.

Furthermore have you seen those cars? They are essentially undifferentiated from their ICE counterparts.
Phil's contributions on Data Wrangler were amazing! And if you haven't seen his Burrito tool, you should check that out too ;-)
I hate Rails. Node is the way to go.
Node > Python > Rails
Two of my favorites:

- Django (perhaps with the exception of class-based views, which are getting better) - https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/

- Stripe - https://stripe.com/docs
I have often thought we should have a hash-tag means of labelling some comments or threads. For example the above FAQ would be #hiringbestpractise (or possibly #tokenadulthomerun ). Then this thread would be found if anyone searched HN for that tag, and indeed would rank top of all #hiringbestpractise tagged comments.

Then tokenadult could simply point people to the hashtag page and say enter the right phrase.

I for one would value seeing the top rated comments from HN on any range of given subjects, even several years back

#justthinkingoutloufd
Leaky abstractions have nothing to do with leaking memory. A leaky abstraction is a layer that attempts to reduce complexity and fails at its job by not hiding enough of the ugly parts.

It's a Spolsky-ism:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...

Edit: Egg meet face.
If I had a choice I would have certainly picked EM. But I am not sure, how much of Rails code can be ported over to Event driven model of EM. I think the only thing which can be reliably ported is models.

Now, they did evaluate EM apparently and according to them node.js performed 20 times better than EM/twisted in certain tests and hence they went ahead with node.js. I am curious as anyone else to see, what those tests were.
I find the statement Most traffic coming from Nigeria is fraudulent to be bollocks.

I don't.

Criminals are minority of the Nigerian population, but that minority spends an inordinate amount of their energy trolling online and looking for new venues that regular Nigerians are not likely to visit.

Therefore if you're a US based and targeted company, the majority of YOUR Nigerian traffic IS likely to be fraud. It isn't most of the fraud that you've got to deal with, but it is likely to be so ridiculously obvious and easy to deal with that you'd be a fool not to.

(Of course this is widely enough known that Nigerian scammers use proxies to hide their origin.)
Anyway I can invite other players by sending them a link and not use facebook?
Using LAB wouldn't be so bad. It'd take quite some adjustment though.
The AirBnB Wedding
I don't think they offer much. However, I'm still glad to see them.

The reason I like lots of different rankings using lots of different criteria and weighting is that the tend to dilute the impact of any one single ranking.

The reality is that people pay a lot of attention to rankings. Right now, US News and World Report does have an outsized impact on how people think of universities. And as a lot of people know, not a single public university shows up on their rankings.

For instance, UC schools tend to have very well regarded faculty and graduate programs. The undergraduate programs are good too, but these schools admit large numbers of in-state students. The downside is that admissions standards are lower as a result, the upside is that far more low income students get a crack at an education at a true research university.

US News rewards private research universities with very small undergraduate student bodies for the resulting "eliteness" of undergraduate admissions, which is actually ok. But does Berkeley or UCLA get any credit for enrolling more low income students than the entire ivy league each? No, not a bit, but they do get dinged for the impact on their numbers, which is how a university that is in the top 5 for almost every department still ends up outside the top 2.

Then you have the Washington Monthly rankings, which perhaps over-emphasize this (along with graduate programs in engineering and science) and are stacked with top public research universities - though it doesn't get anywhere close to the US News kind of attention. Honestly, it is a little silly to see Harvard ranked so low. But it underscores how different a conclusion you can reach with very reasonable measurements.

And then you have international rankings like this one, or the USNRC which tend to emphasize scholarship and research, and so forth.

I guess I'd say I'd prefer to see no numerical rankings, but if we have to have them, I'd like so many that it becomes clear that numerical rankings may be measuring very different things and that no single list has an outsized impact on the way people perceive universities.
Any test like this will work so long as not everyone is doing it. Once enough companies use that as a filter, the bar will be raised.
See here http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
The Early Stages of Software-defined Networking
Another junior here! It's always great to meet other passionate high school students at these conferences.
The content is behind a pay wall
It's correct. No other browser will work on Windows RT, just like no other browser will work on WP8.
The best quote I saw in the article is this: “a Home Depot view of the hiring process, in which filling a job vacancy is seen as akin to replacing a part in a washing machine. … Like a replacement part, job requirements have very precise specifications. Job candidates must fit them perfectly or the job won’t be filled.”

Totally accurate - workers are treated as red boxes in spreadsheets, to be hired as necessary and "rightsized" when the project is over.
Legitimate ones? Hard to tell.
Onlookers as a result of this coverage? Lots.

I don't really want to meaningfully count :).
Lotte: Automated, headless browser testing using PhantomJS
They know who you are and what link you forwarded. The only thing keeping it out of the public eye is Facebook's discretion, and they have a track record of unpredictably disclosing more data about you without an opt-in.
See here http://evworld.com/insider.cfm?archyr=2012&nextedition=3...
I assure you I can ably speak extemporaneously about anything I grok in technical detail when required, but I am speaking about the simple act of choosing which thing to talk about.
I actually work at Fog Creek for Joel; I just happened to pick an absolutely horrid way to phrase what I was trying to convey. (I edited the original post to clarify.)

The memory management is the part of COM that leaks through the abstraction layer in my experience, but it has usually leaked through in MS's attempt to actually properly jacket the things in full-blown .NET objects. I've otherwise not had issues.

I have a hunch I'd also complain about the remote proxying if I used DCOM from .NET, but I haven't.
I think the parent means that it's a leaky abstraction because normally the GC takes care of deallocating memory of CLR objects but it can't help you with native code.

Also, parent works for Fog Creek.
Firefox tabs don't look native on any platform. For one reason or another it seems the developers aren't interested in doing so, or they'd have done something since it's more-or-less a regression since FF2 on linux and a longstanding issue elsewhere.
> I will ask a question early in the 5 minutes that is a complete tangent and has little to do with their goal. A star candidate will politely refuse to go down this rat hole and insist that we stay on topic.

These types of "trick" questions don't allude to anything. A star candidate also wants to respect their interviewer and refusing to answer a question can be seen as disrespectful.

Granted, the characteristic you're trying to surface is a fantastic one (saying no) - but this is not a surefire way of discovering it.
Full text PDF http://ernstchan.com.nyud.net/fefe/src/1346163651220.pdf

Actual title is "Persistent cannabis users show neuropsychological decline from childhood to midlife".
That's been on my plate for a week, but I simply didn't get around to it. Stay tuned!
It appears this was never for network discoverability, but stats instead, and a bad hostname was simply filled in:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/19852289#19852289

Perhaps for testing purposes?
"What happens when the stats server isn't reachable?"

And then it got left that way, WHOOPS.

Long story short, this problem appears to have been resolved the same day it started, since it did not require a software update to fix, they just updated the web views for their store pages.

Is anyone still concretely still seeing the problem?
Zynga (ZNGA) massively guides down their profit estimates
I put a piece of paper on the desk in front of them. It has the number "3" with a big red X through it. Then I hold a baseball bat in a threatening position and tell them to give me an integer between 1 and 10.

This technique works wonders, as I'm able to filter out the 90% of candidates who are losers.

Spoiler: the right answer is 8.
Facebook's New Video Ad "Things that Connect Us"
Always be sharing
Ask HN: Best alternative to iOS6 Maps App for New Yorkers?
After all the uproar about how bad the new Apple app is, I still haven't found much written about the best alternative.

Need something that works with transit and accurately shows streets in Manhattan. Suggestions?
So you're saying he's deliberately but perhaps covertly telegraphing the message "white people, don't talk to me"?

No, I did not say that. I don't think he was sending that message deliberately. (As an aside, the message wasn't "don't talk to me.)

Oh, for real? Who blamed you for what?

You and _pius are clearly accusing me of racial insensitivity.

It may be non-racist, but it's still culturally tone-deaf.

I mean, I do think the "message" I claimed was being sent was stated overbroadly by me. But, for example, I definitely would not ever talk to a black person about their clothes if they were not wearing clothing I was familiar with, out of fear that they would be offended - even by a compliment. Even if I said something like, "That outfit looks really good on you," they'd like take my social awkwardness as a sign that I was somehow making fun of them (which I would never do). Or they'd consider me incapable of rendering a judgement about a style of fashion that I'm not familiar wth, and just be insulted.

Why should he make your distress a priority when you care none for his?

I never said that. In fact, if I didn't care about race relations and want them to be better, I wouldn't have commented in the first place. And I care about race relations because I care about people. I don't want anybody to be distressed.

needlessly distressful (racist, dehumanizing, othering, outgroup-reinforcing) things for the author

If you think the calculator incident was racist or dehumanizing, as described, then I can see why you would think I don't care about that guy's distress. But it was not racist or dehumanizing. It may have made the author feel like part of an "outgroup" as you say, but that was not intentional. At least as I recall the incident being described in the post. It was just some really naive person who made a mistake. I thought that was obvious from the description. And you may disagree with this, but if it was just a naive person who made a mistake about what the guy was wearing, it was not racism.

I'm not sure if I want to continue this discussion, but I will read any response and may or may not respond.
have you tried Lumatic?
This reference installation of the site doesn't use SSL/TLS, and sends the supposedly "secret" message in the clear over the wire to your server. The decryption key is also transmitted in this manner.

As someone else mentioned, the decryption key has almost no entropy at all.

Any upstream provider (your internet cafe, ISP, FBI, etc.) or the site operator (OP) can read your "secure" message with almost no effort. This is false security.
The other way to prevent spam is to hit 'em in the economics. If you require the sender put $1 in escrow, which the recipient can claim if it's spam (or, generally, not worth their time - but that'd be socially mediated), then you have changed things substantially.
Personality is certainly a legal deciding factor in hiring someone for a position in a company, especially in at-will employment states.

It is illegal for a company to not hire on undue reasons such as race, religion, political affiliations, etc., but you are entering into an employment relationship, and it is not unfair to understand more about the person you are paying to work with.
The post is apparently a marketing effort. The interview question is pretty old. If it is that effective as claimed, it would have been known and applied widely. (Then, candidates will prepare for the question and it is not revealing at all.)

Also, claiming any interview question as <bold> MOST </bold> revealing is simply simple-minded.
2013 might be the year of the 3D printer
That's a brilliant write-up. I'm still none the wiser what the evaluate function actually looks like, but he makes the rest seem simple enough to play around with.
At one stage, FeedBurner subscriber counts acted a bit like a mega cheap circulation auditor. That is, if my blog said 25,000 subscribers, advertisers were likely to believe that number versus any stats I might produce myself. This was a pretty big deal for me at one point, though nowadays it's not that important at all.
I honestly don't understand why that's crazy. Empty string evaluates as falsey, so the "or" picks the 10, which is obviously equal to 10. Or am I missing something?
"Programmers could leverage their JavaScript skills."

I'm confused by that being an advantage - I guess that's better than using some language you don't know at all, but it's still a bit of a different approach to JS, no?
Cool article, thanks. I used to spend 90% of my downtime trying to improve my stats and machine learning knowledge, but in the last couple years I've come to realize how much my lack of proper engineering was hurting me.

A (flawed) analogy: if data science is storytelling, stats is the story and engineering is the words you use to tell it. You need to do well at both to effectively tell your story.

>...good engineering going out the window quickly with elaborate ensembling.

This is one of my criticisms of data mining contests (sorry kaggle!). When I was in grad school I liked doing these contests to get practical experience - my last company actually recruited me through one. But as they got more popular I found the best engineers and data scientists stopped having as much of a chance of winning. Good modelers get 90% of the way there and then are beaten by impractical solutions that would get someone fired from a job.
If most of your site is rendered with JavaScript and most of your content is delivered via JSON, you're kind of screwed.
Problem: then they will realize they are getting a shitty deal with 20,000 shares out of 80 million and want a real slice. Better to leave them numerically illiterate.
Superfast Star Spotted Orbiting Milky Way’s Black Hole
I don't even remember what it is that feedburner does; perhaps you should have (re)sold me on the concept so as to get new blood involved.
Interesting: just last night I received an email from the founders of Askolo announcing the their pivot to a service that does exactly this. I believe the name is "Vapor Text".

Edit: here's the email, for reference:

Hi Max,

Since Askolo soft launched earlier this year, our team has been thrilled with the quality of discussion that's taken place on the site. We've realized however, that we could make a greater impact working on other projects and we've made the difficult decision of moving Askolo into maintenance mode. All existing content will remain available on the site but future updates and new features will be discontinued.

We've recently shifted our focus to a new product - Vapor Text - that we're really excited about. Vapor lets you send private messages to friends that disappear once they're read. You can download it now from the Apple App Store: http://itunes.apple.com/app/vapor-text/id563087964?mt=8.

Thanks for all your support and free feel to reach out to hello@ovenlabs.com if you have any questions.

--Ovenlabs Team
Ah bomberman! Very cool. The game is a bit laggy for some reason for me, but still cool.

How long did it take to make the graphics/sprites?
I recently challenged people to codegolf fizzbuzz (http://swizec.com/blog/fizzbuzz-without-ifs-in-90-char-i-wil...)

The Haskell solution was really cool:

[max(show x)(concat[n|(f,n)<-[(3,"Fizz"),(5,"Buzz")],mod x f==0])|x<-[1..100]]

This is much simpler and it looks easier to extend as well.
Amazon Orders More than 10,000 Nvidia Tesla cards
For Firefox, there is an Adblock subscription called "Antisocial" http://adblockplus.org/en/subscriptions (at the bottom of the page)
I'm currently working with a couple of colleagues to start a business investing at the $10k - $60k level in agribusiness in a few countries in Africa. There's a huge lack of viable finance in this area, and lots of opportunity if you take the time to get to know business owners and the risks involved.

Seeing the potential that exists when you latch on to an enthusiastic entrepreneur who is then able to provide jobs for people who would otherwise be 'reluctant entrepreneurs' is extremely motivating.

There's another comment here about people being entitled, comparing that to Chinese or Indians who set up shop in Africa and do well, but there's an extreme amount of selection bias in those results. People who get up and leave their own countries in order to travel somewhere else are in no way representative of the population, and also escape societal and social pressures that might otherwise stifle their entrepreneurship. Comparing locals to migrants and then generalizing across the population is not an accurate viewpoint. Yes there is often a culture of dependency brought on by years and years of being exposed to aid programs, but there are many, many entrepreneurs who are doing great things.
Conservatives often like to pretend that "the pendulum has gone too far" and that the poor white men are now the ones being discriminated against!

"You can't say anything anymore!" they'll exclaim, usually they want to right to continue to call Latinos "Wetback". Appparently their inability to insult people is a terrible crime.
nobody is talking about small business. the talk is about small business becoming medium or large. or even small-but-not-so-small.
I'm not sure a company that is losing $30M a month (or $400K per year per employee, of which there are 900) can be classified as lean--and possibly not agile, given that they spent a fortune creating the Roadster only to abandon it three years later as being too expensive, having sold only 2K copies. I'm sure it was a learning experience, but Tesla's burn rate is only increasing, so I hope they learned enough.

And, while SpaceX's rockets are undoutably advanced and very safe, they aren't currently the cheapest cost per pound sent into LEO; that honor belongs to the Russians:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_launch_sy...

SpaceX has some cheaper launches "in development" but they've already revised their initial prices upwards of 100% of what they claimed early on for their operational launches, so you really can't trust what they claim for in development vehicles.
What is the sense that it makes?
Quite a pivot! Are they charging for it?
Have you checked http://privnote.com ?
Building World-ready Applications in JavaScript Becoming a Reality
I would prefer to force candidates to implement FizzBuzz in a language invented solely for purposes of that interview (and which will never be used again). This places all candidates on the same level.

It's probably a good thing I don't interview people for programming positions...
Russia Denies Sending High-tech Spies to The U.S.
Looks great but I could not play with my azerty keyboard :p
I guess for me you would map:

z : up

s : down

q : left

d : right
Love this headline. For those unaware, Craigslist is suing PadMapper for using their data.
One theory is that the lack of diversity is the result of, not the cause of, much subtle racism/sexism/etc.
Forget Facebook. Business software start-ups are sexy again